At the end of everything — the Yadus dead at Prabhāsa, Balarāma gone, Kṛṣṇa's body abandoned — the obvious question is available to anybody.
Parīkṣit does not ask it. He has asked about chronology, about the morality of the rāsa twice, about a discrepancy he had heard elsewhere, about why brahmanas cursed the Vṛṣṇis. Here he says nothing.
⚑ Śuka asks it himself, mid-summary, and answers it in the same breath.
The construction matters. He lists what Kṛṣṇa demonstrably could do:
"As a mortal, he brought his preceptor's son back from Yama's world. When you were being scorched by the great weapon, he accorded you shelter. He conquered Isha, the one who is like death to the attendants of Death. He conveyed the hunter to heaven in his physical body."1
Retrieval from death. Protection in the womb. Victory over Śiva. A body carried bodily to heaven.
And then, without a paragraph break:
"How could the lord not have protected himself? He is the only cause behind creation, preservation and destruction. He is the possessor of infinite potencies."1
⚑ The four proofs are not context. They are the premises of the objection, and Śuka has assembled them himself.
"However, he no longer desired to maintain his body in this mortal world, after having demonstrated the ultimate state of welfare."1
⚑ No longer desired.
Not could not. Not should not. Not a reason at all — a statement about what he wanted.
⚠ Which is a complete answer to the question as posed. How could he not protect himself? — he could; he did not want to. ⚑ And it is an answer that closes the question without engaging anything the four proofs established, because none of them was about capacity in doubt.
A few lines earlier the chapter has already supplied the frame it is working in:
"Know that his birth, disappearance and activities in this world were the result of his maya, since like an actor, he imitated the behaviour of embodied creatures."1
⚑ Birth, death and everything between, classified together as performance.
⚠ And this volume has form with that word. At 10(57) it says twice that "though he knew the truth" he grieved, and supplies its own gloss — "they imitated the behaviour of the world of men." ⚑ Same verb, same construction, sixty-odd chapters apart — and at 10(77), where it would settle the volume's hardest passage, the text conspicuously does not use it.
One physical detail sits just before the question and bears on it.
"…use agneyi to burn down his auspicious body, which is a delight to the worlds. Instead, he entered his own abode."1
⚑ The option is named and declined. The fire-weapon that would have consumed the body is available, and what happens instead is a departure — he entered his own abode — with the body not disposed of by any means the passage describes.
And then the gods watch and cannot follow:
"Since Krishna's movements could not be discerned, though they had watched, they were extremely surprised… In the sky, when a flash of lightning leaves the circle of the clouds, mortals cannot notice its movement."1
⚠ Only "a few, Brahma, Rudra and some others, noticed Hari's movements of yoga."
⚑ So the departure is witnessed by the entire pantheon and legible to almost none of it — which is the volume's verification habit inverted. Everywhere else it supplies a delegated sceptic who reports what he saw. Here it supplies an audience that saw and could not read it.
The question everybody can see and nobody raises gets asked by the person telling the story. Notice when a narrator has to supply his own opposition — it means the objection was going to be made anyway.
Somebody assembles the evidence against their own position and then answers it in one clause. Read the clause. If it is about preference rather than capacity, the objection has been redirected rather than met.
He no longer desired to is a complete answer to why did he not, and no answer at all to should he have. Those are different questions and the second one is the one you were asking.
A whole life gets reclassified as performance in a subordinate clause. That reclassification is doing more work than anything it is attached to.
Compare how this volume normally handles a difficulty.
At 10(12) Parīkṣit halts the narration over a chronology gap and Śuka answers it as doctrine. At 10(29) and 10(33) Parīkṣit raises the morality of the rāsa and gets two different answers. At 10(75) he cites a version he already holds and demands the discrepancy be explained. At 11(1) he objects that the Vṛṣṇis did not deserve their curse.
⚑ In every case the objection comes from the listener, is printed in full, and is answered at length. The apparatus is one of this volume's most distinctive features.
Here the apparatus is not used. ⚠ The listener is silent, the objection is raised by the teller inside his own summary, and it is closed in eleven words.
⚑ The volume's most damaging question receives the least of its machinery — and the machinery exists, works, and is in the room.
Two readings are available and neither is in the text, and both would make the passage easier.
Not that he was invulnerable and the death was staged for the audience. The chapter says he "no longer desired to maintain his body", which concedes that maintaining it was a thing he had been doing. ⚠ The actor clause covers the activities; it does not say the withdrawal was fictitious.
And not that the withdrawal was necessitated. ⚑ No necessity is named. The Yadus are dead, the burden is discharged, and the reason given is he no longer desired — not that anything required it.
⚠ Held as printed. The volume answers a capacity question with a preference and offers nothing else, and supplying a necessity — the age turning, the mission completed, the departure owed — would be inventing the reason the text declines to give.
The strongest support is the self-assembly. Śuka lists four demonstrations of exactly the capacity the question turns on, and then asks the question. That is not a passage stumbling into a difficulty.
A second support. The subordinate placement. It is one sentence inside a summary paragraph, between the list and the answer, with no framing on either side.
The tension, preserved. ⚑ A text that stages its own reception constantly declines to stage this one. Held as printed.
A second tension. ⚠ The actor clause makes the whole life performance and the answer makes the departure a preference — and a preference is a real state of a real agent. The two are not obviously compatible and the volume does not reconcile them.
Open question. ⚑ After having demonstrated the ultimate state of welfare. ⚠ Demonstrated to whom, and is the demonstration the reason or the precondition? The clause is ambiguous as printed and the volume does not disambiguate it in the range read.
Set against The Narrator Stops the Story to Say That What He Just Narrated Cannot Be True, the two are the volume's only self-raised objections and they are handled oppositely. ⚑ At 10(77) the narrator interrupts to attack the transmitters and leaves the difficulty open. Here he raises the difficulty and closes it in a clause. Both are Śuka; neither involves Parīkṣit.
Against He Went to a Funeral for People He Knew Were Alive, the actor clause is the same category the volume names at 10(57) — "they imitated the behaviour of the world of men." ⚑ The label exists, is used at 10(57) and 11(31), and is withheld at 10(77).
Against He Did Not Come to Visit. He Came to Check., the contrast is with the volume's verification habit at its strongest. This text sends delegated sceptics and prints protocols, and at the one point where the protocol would bear on its own central claim, there is no sceptic and no protocol.
Against He Says Out Loud That He Will Destroy His Own Family So He Can Go Home, the departure was announced thirty chapters earlier with a stated benefit. ⚑ The plan gives a reason — I can then peacefully return — and the closing summary gives a preference. Neither is a necessity.
Objection Preemption Closes — the seller voices the buyer's doubt before the buyer finishes forming it, in the buyer's own words, and answers it on the spot. The doubt never gets held up as a wall, and naming it accurately makes the speaker feel like someone who understands you.
Śuka runs that structure precisely, and the tell is that he builds the objection stronger than a listener would have. ⚑ Somebody asking why did he not save himself would not first recite four demonstrations of the relevant power. Śuka does, which makes the question as sharp as it can be — and then answers it in eleven words.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the sales version pre-empts a doubt the audience already has, and here the audience does not have it. Parīkṣit has objected five times in this recitation and is silent at exactly this point. ⚠ Śuka is not naming a doubt his listener is forming. He is introducing one — which is the opposite operation performed with the same machinery.
And that changes what the brevity means. ⚑ An eleven-word answer to a difficulty nobody had raised would read as evasion. An eleven-word answer to a difficulty the speaker has just made maximally acute reads as confidence — so the strengthening is what buys the shortness, and the whole exchange happens between the narrator and himself.
Which locates the cost. ⚑ The question is now on the record permanently, in its strongest form, with the volume's authority behind the phrasing — and every later reader inherits Śuka's version rather than their own. ⚠ That is what pre-emption buys and what it cannot take back.
Noh Theater and Social Positioning — the performance is understood as a form. Masks and structured gesture communicate position, and the audience reads them as form rather than as deception, which is what makes the convention work.
Like an actor, he imitated the behaviour of embodied creatures invokes that frame explicitly, and applies it to birth, disappearance and activities — the whole life.
⚑ The insight the pairing produces: a theatrical frame protects the performer and costs the performance its stakes, and the volume takes the first and tries to keep the second. ⚠ The chapter needs the withdrawal to be a genuine act with a genuine reason — he no longer desired — and it needs the life to have been performance. A preference belongs to an agent, and an actor's exit is scripted.
⚠ The volume prints both and does not choose. ⚑ Which is the same thing it does at 10(57) with the performed condolence and at 10(77) with the grief — three passages where it has a category for staged behaviour, uses it twice, withholds it once, and never asks what it would mean for the rest.
Sharpest implication. *Śuka lists four demonstrations that Kṛṣṇa could retrieve the dead, shield a child in the womb, defeat Śiva and carry a body to heaven — and then asks, of himself, "How could the lord not have protected himself?", and answers: he no longer desired to maintain his body.* The volume's most damaging question is raised by the teller, in a subordinate clause, in the one place a listener who has objected five times is silent — and it is closed with a preference rather than a reason.
Generative questions.